Trevor Noah and Brown v. Board

I have the guilty pleasure of scanning the traditional media and entertainment. It’s not that any of the various personalities I come across have any intelligent thoughts of their own, witness the ramblings of Margaret Brennan, but their utterances provide a glimpse into the larger sociology of the Left.

So it was of interest that I came across former “Daily Show” host Trevor Noah’s “What Now?” podcast where he interviews Princeton University professor Ruha Benjamin. Noah states:

“And that’s a really powerful thing I’ve learned in communicating with other people. When I’m in a room with anyone where we start to tie together multiple things. So, if I’m in a room with Black people, already there’s like an implicit trust because we know what certain actions, words, and vibes mean.”

I find Noah to be a poseur, and of course he has to have a podcast. But he provides us a great service by providing a gathering place, much like a watering hole on the Serengeti, where he and his ideological ilk can gather in a place of perceived safety and can be observed. So Noah extends his remarks and a little later asks Benjamin:

“Do you think that integration was the right move?”

Benjamin replies:

“No, I don’t. And I don’t think it’s actually that controversial….

“…But again, when you’re being integrated into institutions, into a culture, that’s a supremacist culture. That’s a culture that feds off of hierarchy, off of insecurity, anxiety. Why are we being integrated into that?”

Let’s take a step back.

In our history, the symbol for desegregation is the 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education. This involved black parents suing the Board of Education in Topeka in order to overturn the school district’s policy of racial segregation of “separate but equal.”

The Court reached an unanimous decision overturning not only a lower court decision that supported the policy of segregation, but also the landmark 1896 case Plessy v. Ferguson which served as precedent for allowing racial segregation.

Brown was seen both in its time and to this day as a great triumph of the civil rights movement, and helped to propel that movement forward to greater victories in the years to come. However, that case contained a flaw that has ramifications in the present.

In order to understand the Supreme Court of 1954, one needs to understand its chief justice, Earl Warren. Warren was the governor of California in 1953 when he was nominated to the position by Eisenhower, a move the latter called “the biggest damn-fool mistake I ever made.”

Warren had always been a politician, holding various elected offices over the previous three decades. In many of the cases that the Warren Court decided, you can see the influence of Warren the politician: a counting of the votes, an understanding of the political ramifications both domestically and internationally of the cases involved, and a premium placed on political results as opposed to correct judicial process. It is in this light that we need to revisit Brown and the foundations of desegregation in America.

The opinion in Brown, and there was only one, was written by Warren himself and stated two important conclusions. The first was that the Court was unable to find in the Fourteenth Amendment justification for abolishing segregation in public education. However, it did find justification for abolishing it due to the psychological effects segregation caused in black children, a justification that was not based on evidence cited in the main opinion but rather in the footnotes.

So the Court did not find in Brown that racial segregation was a moral wrong, but was wrong only in the effects it caused. In other words, racial segregation was wrong based on contingent, not moral factors.

This distinction is important for two reasons. The first is that it points to how Warren’s political approach to judicial reasoning affected the Court; for Warren, a progressive politician, the ends justified the means. Brown provided Warren and the Court an excellent opportunity to unravel segregation. Warren, understanding the political resistance that it would generate in the South, was willing to stretch reasoning in order to achieve an unanimous decision in order to deny that resistance any purchase. If Warren had to achieve his precious 9-0 decision by resting it on psychological contortions, rather than natural rights and the Constitution, then so be it.

The second is that since racial segregation was wrong in the negative effects that it had on black children, it is conceivable that another case of “separate but equal” could be decided differently if it could be proven to have positive effects.

That second reason is not as far-fetched as it sounds. During the BLM miasma the cultural-Marxist idea of “white supremacy” entered the mainstream vernacular; remember the 2021 California recall election when Larry Elder was called the black face of white supremacy. This is the idea that American institutions are implicitly rigged in favor of maintaining white power, leaving blacks to create their own alternatives.

This is what Benjamin and Noah refer to when they discuss “integration” into a “supremacist culture” and the comfort level blacks (or as Noah pointed out in the podcast, individual members of all ethnic and racial groups) have with one another.

You see the ideological foundations for racially-segregated schools. It is conceivable that a group of black racists could bring a case one day for publicly-funded all-black schools, citing the contingent Brown and beneficial effect of such schools on black children.

Far-fetched? Well it’s not going to happen any time soon given the current retreat of DEI and racial set-asides in general, as well as the current composition of the Court. However, as the first Trump administration showed with its three Supreme Court picks, things can change rapidly, and by 2029 three Republican justices will be 74-years old or older. How would a Court newly restocked by a Democrat with two to three more Ketanji Brown Jacksons rule?

Time to get another case in front of the Court and get this corrected while we still have Alito and Thomas there.